I’ve just started reading Rupi Kaur’s second book of poetry: ‘the sun and her flowers.’ I love the empowering and relatable nature of her poems, although at times I find them quite painful – It’s like listening to my head, when all I want to do is be left alone with my heart.

Anyway, these two poems are more heart than head. The first is from ‘the sun and her flowers’ and the second is a poem from ‘milk and honey’.

There is train running through my dreams.
It is a memory, as warm and comforting
As that small, dark room I lay in,
Tied in a knot by the pink blanket with silky edges.
I still hear the train, lonely in the woods,
Rumbling its freight along the tracks down the bottom
As I struggled to sleep,
Listening to faint voices somewhere else,
Breathing in the sacred, indescribable smells of that old room with its secrets

I really like this song for a lot of reasons and, despite the view that it is full of despair and sadness about not fulfilling dreams, I just see it as whimsically beautiful, sadly humorous and honest. All of us could have been one of these things first and done things differently…although if I could go back and choose what I could have been, it would obviously have had to be the kettle…